As used herein, “broadcast” refers to any sort of electronic transmission of signals from a source to multiple receiving devices. Thus, a “broadcast” may be a cable broadcast, a satellite broadcast, a terrestrial broadcast, a traditional free television broadcast, a radio broadcast, and/or an internet broadcast, and a “broadcaster” may be any entity that transmits signals for reception by a plurality of receiving devices. The signals may include content, (also referred to herein as “programs”), and/or commercials (also referred to herein as “advertisements”). An “advertiser” is any entity that provides an advertisement for inclusion in a broadcast signal.
As is well known, advertisers pay significant sums of money to broadcasters to have their commercials/advertisements broadcast in association with particular programs at particular times (i.e., during a certain “time slot”). Typically, broadcasters honor their contractual obligations to the advertisers and transmit commercials during the agreed upon time slots. However, mistakes and/or last minute programming changes occasionally cause a commercial to be broadcast during a time slot different from the agreed upon time slot, or to not be broadcast at all.
Additionally, businesses such as businesses selling consumer products are very interested in the advertising and selling strategies of their competitors. To this end, these businesses are interested in obtaining competitor expenditure studies which identify data such as the times of broadcast of their competitor's commercials, the channels/programs being sponsored by their competitor, etc. This information reflects how the competitor is spending its advertising dollars and may be used to develop a competing advertising strategy and/or to decipher information about the competitor's strategic plans.
In order to monitor the broadcasting of commercials, monitoring stations may be installed at various locations in various broadcasting areas. These monitoring stations collect information indicative of the commercials broadcast in their associated broadcasting areas, the times/dates at which those commercials were broadcast, and the stations or channels that broadcast those commercials. The collected information may be in an analog and/or a digital format. The information collected for each commercial identified by the monitoring stations may be some or all of the commercial as broadcast, a signature for some or all of the commercial as broadcast (e.g., a proxy uniquely representative of the content of the commercial), and/or a code associated with, and possibly broadcast with, the commercial. The collected information typically uniquely identifies the commercial with which it is associated. It may also identify the station broadcasting the commercial and/or the channel on which the commercial was broadcast and die time/date on which the commercial was broadcast.
Each monitoring station is typically provided with a database storing the codes and/or signatures that are used to identify known commercials. In particular, when a commercial is found in the broadcast, the monitoring station automatically compares the code and/or signature representative of the broadcast to the codes and/or signatures stored in the database to automatically identify the commercial. If a matching code and/or signature is found in the database, the commercial is identified from the database. The identity of the commercial is then stored in a memory. The identity of the commercial is typically stored in association with a time and/or a date stamp identifying the time/date at which the commercial was broadcast and an identification of the channel on which the commercial was broadcast.
In the event an automatic identification of the commercial is not achieved (e.g., the commercial is not yet identified in the database because, for example, it is a new commercial), the monitoring station stores the collected information representative of the commercial (e.g., a code and/or a signature) in memory for later identification by a human being. To make it possible for a human being to identify the commercial, the monitoring station also stores and forwards a copy of at least a portion of the commercial or a replica thereof to enable a human to view and/or hear the commercial. A human being will subsequently view the commercial or the replica of the commercial to determine if it is a commercial, and, if so, if it is a new commercial or a known commercial. If it is a new commercial, the human being will provide a (preferably unique) name for the commercial and add it to the appropriate database(s) in association with a code and/or signature uniquely representative of that commercial to enable automatic identification in the future.
Periodically, the monitoring stations transmit the collected information to one or more central data processing facilities. The central data processing facility(ies) then process the information received from the monitoring stations to identify commercials that were not identifiable to the monitoring station(s) (e.g., via human intervention) as explained above, and to compile reports identifying the commercial that were actually broadcast, the stations and/or channels on which the commercials were broadcast, and the times/dates at which those broadcasts occurred. The report(s) may then be sold to one or more interested parties.
As mentioned above, whenever a broadcast segment cannot be automatically identified as a specific commercial by, for example, comparing a signature of the segment to a database storing signatures of known commercials, it is necessary to have a human being review the broadcast segment to determine if the segment is a new commercial to be added to the database for subsequent automatic identification efforts, if the segment is an already known commercial, or if the segment is not a commercial (e.g., the segment is content). Such human verification efforts are more expensive than automatic identification efforts because the human being must be compensated for their efforts. Therefore, it is desirable to reduce the number of instances requiring human verification. Because new commercials not yet present in the database require human viewing to properly add the commercial to the database, the focus on reducing human verification efforts lies upon distinguishing commercials from content.
More specifically, since commercial monitoring systems are focused on commercial broadcast identification and/or verification as opposed to content identification and/or verification, methods of distinguishing the portions of a broadcast signal that correspond to commercials from portions of the broadcast signal that correspond to content have been proposed. These methods are utilized at the monitoring stations to ensure that the portions of the broadcast signal corresponding to content are discarded while the portions of the broadcast signal corresponding to the commercials are processed as explained above.
Some proposed methods of distinguishing commercials from content rely upon triggers embedded in the broadcast signal. For instance, commercials in video broadcast signals are typically separated from content by one or more blank video frames. Therefore, some known systems attempt to identify blank video frames as a trigger for when to begin collecting and storing the data received at the monitoring station. Because commercials or blocks of commercials are typically interspersed within a broadcast signal in relative short blocks of times (e.g., five minutes or less), the known systems identify commercials and/or blocks of commercials by identifying blank frames (or pairs of blank frames, or groups of blank frames) separated by less than a predetermined length of time (e.g., five minutes). When such a pair of blank video frames (or group of blank video frames) is detected, the known systems begin processing the information collected around the blank frames to identify the commercials, their time/date of broadcast, and/or the station/channel carrying the commercials.
Some known systems attempt to determine when a broadcast image is blank by decompressing digital video streams, and comparing the decompressed video frames to a predetermined color. However, this method has several drawbacks. Decompressing digital content can be time consuming and/or may require special hardware. Further, broadcasters sometimes simultaneously broadcast two content and/or commercial streams with one of the content and/or commercial streams being located in a relatively large primary viewing window and the other of the content and/or commercial streams being located in a relatively small secondary viewing window (e.g., a picture-in-picture window) embedded in or overlying the primary viewing window. Known systems may miss the occurrence of a blank PIP/secondary viewing window due to activity in the main/primary viewing window and/or vice versa.